


If (falling in love); {don't}

by EdgarAllenPoet



Series: The Outfield [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, Alternate Universe - College/University, Computers, Dorks in Love, F/M, Graduate School, I'm Bad At Tagging, M/M, Matt Holt is a fail boat, Multi, Pre-Poly, Robots, The Outfield au, tag as we go
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-23 04:51:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12499160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EdgarAllenPoet/pseuds/EdgarAllenPoet
Summary: "If anyone tripped over his robots, Matt would kill them."Matt is a graduate student who accidentally falls in love with his lab neighbor.  The both of them get a little bit more than they bargained for.





	If (falling in love); {don't}

**Author's Note:**

> a taste of a thing i've been working on. my friends keeps talking about their engineering classes and i got INSPIRED. 
> 
> there's going to be two pain parts to this once it gets going, and it shouldn't be AS long as The Outfield, but then again, who knows.

Matt’s lab was in the worst possible place on the entire campus. 

 

Okay, no, that was a lie.  He could have been located in the basement of the physics building, which was a fifteen minute walk from any and all parking lots, and was prone to problems with both air conditioning and wifi connection.  That’s the lab Matt had spent all four years of his undergrad in, building robots out of Legos, changing batteries in broken door sensors, and occasionally typing data so he didn’t look like the most useless research assistant ever.

 

Compared to that, Matt was living the good life.  He had no useless research assistants of his own, because the professor he worked under had told him to just “hire anyone you want,” so Matt could technically choose not to hire anyone.  His sister lived on campus, and she was capable enough to help out if he ever actually needed assistance.  He had a lab in the center of campus instead of the darkest depths, located not too far from all the food and coffee places his heart could desire. 

 

Best yet, his professor hadn’t taken on a graduate student in years and didn’t want to, and since nobody else was working on a project too similar to Matt’s own, he had the place all to himself. 

 

It wasn’t  _ ideal _ for an electrical engineering lab, but it had a lot of perks.  A cot in the corner for when he didn’t feel like driving home at night.  A coffee pot that could be used to make coffee, noodles,  _ and _ soup.  Even better than that, the other lab space in his small, shoebox of a building was entirely empty, leaving the back room area free for Matt’s technology and letting him be as loud and undisturbed as he wanted. 

 

That is, until now. 

 

The lab had been empty since Dr. Dos Santos had retired last December, and the space had been gloriously desolate for the past thirteen months, overlooked by the university overlords. 

 

Until now.  They’d found him out, and they’d assigned someone to the empty lab next door, and Matt was not looking forward to it. 

 

Worse of all, they were in the  _ psychology _ department.  A  _ soft science. _  Those assholes were the  _ worst. _

 

Even so, Matt had to know who he was dealing with.  He let himself in and locked the door firmly behind him.  He ignored the humanoid shadows of half finished projects behind him and kept the lights off as he ducked down under the window and peered out through the blinds. 

 

Whoever it was had a lot of boxes.  Office boxes, like you kept files in.  Matt couldn’t see their face from his perspective at the window.  All he saw was someone- a guy- walking back and forth, box after box, infiltrating Matt’s office space. He was fit too, Matt noticed begrudgingly. His forearms were obviously toned under the thin material of his button up, flexing from the weight of the boxes he was carrying, and his slacks hugged his ass in a way that should  _ not _ be considered safe for work. 

 

Matt was being overrun by a soft science sex god.  What was the world coming to? 

 

Eventually they had to have all of their stuff translocated, because they stopped passing Matt’s window and left him with nothing interesting to look at.  He heaved a sigh as he heaved himself up to his feet, knees and ankles cracking as he went.  That was concerning.  Maybe he should stretch more.  

 

He went farther into his lab, smacking a hand over the lightswitch and blinking into the bright room.  He regarded his messily scrawled to do list on the whiteboard and looked over his table full of projects.

 

Each was named according to their characteristics and who they ended up resembling.  Matt wasn’t much of an artist, so when he was putting the robotic heads together, the end result was always a bit up in the air.  He knew that wasn’t a great way to do things, that it was supposed to be precise and well-planned and expertly designed.  Katie had a lot of opinions on accurate blueprints, but Katie could keep her opinions to herself.  The hardware was solid, and the systems ran the way they were supposed to.  It was the programming that was still a bit faulty, but hey, that’s why Matt was here. 

 

His initiative was to create a robot that not only read and mimicked emotions from human faces (which someone had already accomplished in Japan  _ and  _ England, damn them.  Japan wasn’t a surprise.  That country was unstoppable.  But England?  Ridiculous), but for the robot to be able to respond emotionally as well.  

 

He could do it with the right logarithm.  It wouldn’t be genuine emotion, sure, but it would be as close as they could get with an AI. 

 

And it would be  _ awesome _ . 

 

“Alright, Shaq’,” he said, addressing the robot at the forefront of his workspace.  “Gonna cooperate today?” 

 

Shaq was named after Shaquille O’Neil appropriately, but his actual name was Project 620-MH-517, named for its lab space, creator, number, and year respectively.  That’s right.  Shaquille O’Neil was number five. 

 

Five expensive, useless,  _ emotionless _ robot heads that took up space in Matt’s tiny lab space and kept him company. 

 

Matt would never get his doctorate at this rate. 

 

He turned Shaq’ on and was greeted with a quiet hum of machinery as the robot came to life and shifted its head, plastic and metal facial “muscles” pulling into a neutral expression, head shifting from side to side as it adjusted. 

 

It tilted to the left, following Matt’s own head, and when they moved to go back to the right it stuck, beeped, and started jerking mechanically.  It snagged on itself,  _ again _ .  He really needed to get a mechanical engineer in here to help with this.

 

“Ah fuck,” Matt swore, picking a screw driver up and leaning in to tug the bands free, while Shaq’ kept twitching and whirling loudly.  It was the noise, he reasoned, that caused him not to hear the door opening behind him.  He pulled Shaq’ free with a final, carefully measured  _ yank _ , and smiled in victory as Shaq’ whirled its head around ‘happily.’  

 

Then Shaq’ said, “Hey!” and Matt actually screamed, spinning around and falling back against his work table, screwdriver held out in front of him like a weapon.  No, not Shaq, it was a  _ person,  _ though Shaq’ was wobbling around alarmingly from Matt jarring the table.  Matt reached out a hand and steadied it before confronting the person before him. 

 

Oh.  Just Shiro. 

 

“You asshole!” Matt scolded, jabbing his screw driver in Shiro’s direction, earning him a quiet chuckle and some hands raised in surrender. 

 

“I’m sorry,” Shiro replied, obviously not sorry at all.  He was still smiling.  “Just wanted to stop by.” 

 

Heart rate starting to slow to a normal pace again, Matt set his screw driver down on the table and moved around Shiro to root around in his tool box.  He’d have to take Shaq’s entire head apart again to fix that band that kept sticking,  _ or _ he could ignore it completely and work on the coding, hope that the band didn’t cause any major problems when he ran a systems check. 

 

His next progress meeting was Thursday- no, Friday.  Matt would like to have something actually functioning by then. 

 

“How did you even get in here?” he asked, because he was nearly certain he locked the door behind him.  Maybe the lock was busted again, which meant Matt would have to move all of his prototypes into the side office and out of the front room so they wouldn’t get stolen.  Again.  Project 620-MH-115 had lead a short and tragic life, and Matt had found him disregarded in an overflowing dumpster outside the art building, half busted up and a bit too gross to bother taking back to the lab. 

 

If he had to move all his tech, at least he could rope Shiro into helping him.  Those stupidly muscled arms would finally come in handy for  _ something _ . 

 

Currently, one those stupidly muscled arms was holding out a set of keys, dangling them from his fingers right in front of Matt’s nose.  “Let myself in,” he said, and it took Matt an embarrassing amount of time to connect the dots. 

 

He wondered ‘ _ why does Shiro have a key to  _ my _ lab? _ ’  before it clicked.  Psych department.  New lab neighbors.  Shiro was in the experimental PhD program.  He may have mentioned moving labs over lunch a month or so ago. 

 

God fucking damn it. 

 

“You!” Matt responded intelligently, years of education obviously paying off.  Shiro’s smile was nothing short of mocking. 

 

“Me,” he agreed.  “You should come over later and help me put some bookshelves together.  My RA’s are practically as useless as I am.” 

 

With that, Shiro turned and headed back out the way he came. Through the backroom door.  In  _ Matt’ _ s lab.  

 

Matt couldn’t help but sneak a peak, just to be sure, and yep.  That was the same ass he’d been looking at earlier. 

 

Shiro.  Matt had been ogling  _ Shiro _ .  Matt had mentally referred to his friend as a ‘soft science sex god.’  What was the world coming to? 

 

“And clean out all this garbage in the back room!” Shiro hollered from behind the wall somewhere.  “At least half of it, would ya?  Someone’s going to trip and break a leg.” 

 

If anyone tripped over his robots, Matt would kill them.  Nonetheless, he yelled back, “Sir, yes sir!” an old joke between them poking fun at Shiro’s military days.  Something suddenly felt a whole lot dirtier about saying that, though, and Matt cringed at himself as he felt the tips of his ears burn. 

 

Today was obviously a bum day, at least where interacting with people was concerned.  That was fine.  He had work to do and computers to deal with, and that, at least, made sense.  He powered Shaq’ back off and strolled into his side office, punching the power button on his computer chair and throwing himself into his office chair. 

 

Codes and programs and binaries.  That he could handle.  He listened for a moment to the sounds of people moving around next door, the quiet hum of conversation and the way Shiro’s laugh seemed to slip right between the cracks in the walls.  He shoved in his earbuds and started his music and pretended he didn’t hear anything.

**Author's Note:**

> know any robot puns? 
> 
> punks-n-rec.tumblr.com


End file.
